Where do you think that's going to head? What kind of accountability is he going to face, at least for these extrajudicial killings of drug runners, supposedly on these small boats?

So let me just start by saying I say Department of Defense, because in my view, the name change is not valid until Congress votes the new name.

And many people I know follow that same practice.

So I will call Pete Hexeth the Secretary of Defense.

But what I would say is that this bid to impeach Pete Hegseth was an interesting one.

First of all, it failed in large part, apparently, because 11 Democrats couldn't make the vote that they had been expected to make.

And some of that was because they got stuck behind some motorcade and got stuck in traffic somewhere.

What level of investigation do you think is going to occur and what liability do you think the lawyers that wrote those kind of give the president a pass memos, I'll just call them that, on having the war powers resolution be approved or at least some sense of it? Where do you think those lawyers have liability in terms of trying to pass along evading the law?

that, Claire, would be like, well, just because someone else broke the law doesn't mean this is not breaking the law.

Yeah, but it's gonna be a tough sell for articles of impeachment.

But the boat strikes, as you mentioned, and possibly the Maduro raid stand on a different footing.

And in fact, on the Maduro raid, we already heard Rand Paul in oversight hearings really lay into that decision.

So there's at least one other Republican who was really concerned about that.

And as he argued in hearings with Marco Rubio, it was really an incredible move to depose a sitting head of state and then to claim that that was not an act of war against Venezuela.

And so those actions and the boat strikes have been universally condemned by legal experts.

And that does seem like it could be a threat here, Claire, and I want you to address that.

let me ask Claire that, do we have sufficient regulations for the hypothetical that I described? Does there need to be more? Is it just the lack of enforcement?

For the hypothetical you described, we have sufficient regulations.

It's harassment, plain and simple.

And I think actually Nadine and I are not disagreeing about that, but we still disagree profoundly about Charlottesville and about other instances like that.

First of all, I want to say, and this is not a legal point, this is a practical policy point, I don't think the ACLU should be defending neo-Nazi groups, okay? I don't think it's a great thing for a civil rights organization to do because these are individuals who are determined to violate the civil rights of Jews and of others.

of black Americans, of Jewish Americans, of trans and gay Americans.

They are not there to defend the civil rights of those individuals.

Claire.

Talk to us about some of the unique challenges they present, some of which we're already getting hints of in the exchange Jeff and Larry have been having.

Right.

So the first thing is to think about the architecture of Gaza, four hundred and fifty miles of tunnel system, some of the layers of tunnel actually overlapping on other layers of tunnel.

And it's interesting, the example of the five hundred-pound bomb versus the two thousand-pound bomb.

The other reason why, and Israel is very criticized by going to a higher l- level, a weight of bombing, but it turns out it, it-- actually, the, uh, five hundred-pound bomb was not justified because it only hit surface targets.

If your enemy is underground, you have to use a payload that is going to strike subterranean targets.

So there's no military advantage if you're using a five hundred-pound bomb.

I remember in the beginning of the war in Ukraine, reading about how Ukrainian civilians were going out to repair the oil and gas lines that Russia had bombed so that Russian oil and gas could get to Western Europe, from which Russia was benefiting to the tune of millions of rubles, what, a day, a week? Huge amounts of money that was literally funding the war against Ukraine.

Why are clashes between state authority and federal forces so much more destabilizing than traditional or conventional unrest?

Because traditional unrest is really about the people.

It's not about government, per se.

And hopefully, uh, and this is what we've had for most of our history, uh, you have the federal government and the state governments working together to try to get control over that unrest, to de-escalate the situation, and to work ideally, uh, in harmony together, or at least to have a functional working relationship, uh, and to partner together.

A lot of those partnerships are of long-standing, uh, person-to-person relationships.

Uh, that was one of the things we found in our tabletop exercise, which is that those personal relationships can be very effective in, uh, de-escalating situations, sort of backdoor conversations.

Uh, but when you have the federal government and the state government unable to work together and giving different narratives, it's profoundly confusing to people, and, uh, of course, it will have a tendency to escalate violence, uh, as well as to, uh, really do damage to the rule of law.

So how should we understand this moment? Two American citizens shot and killed by masked federal agents with no immediate accountability.

Tell me about that because it sounds rather familiar at this point.

That's right.

Well, this was actually before the presidential election.

This particular exercise that we held was in September of 2024.

And so we placed this particular scenario in Philadelphia.

It could have been any major democratic city.

And what we saw was that the situation under certain conditions escalated very quickly, and those conditions are present in the Minneapolis case.

But what is his motive, do you think? Is it just about deporting illegal immigrants, or is it more than that?

And do you believe that we're looking at a new world order here? I mean, we've seen significant changes in the way that our own government is being handled.

I think we really are on the cusp of the total breakdown of international law and a new world order.

So Trump has been making threats with regard to Greenland, with regard to Mexico, with regard to Colombia, with regard to Cuba.

And what's particularly striking is that the administration is not particularly seeking to justify these ambitions in terms of international law.

So, again, if you go back to the Spanish-American War, we had stationed a carrier outside of Cuban waters and it got attacked.

Well, excuse me, back up.

We had stationed a battleship in Havana Harbor, and there was an explosion.

But who enforces international law? Obviously, Putin isn't paying attention to it and Trump isn't either.

So the Posse Comitatus says

that federal troops normally cannot engage in law enforcement.

So that is very different from when the governor is in control of the California National Guard under state's active duty status or Title 32, because in that case, there is an exception to posse comitatus when it is under control of state and local authorities.

But when troops are federalized, the posse comitatus act applies, and that is a criminal statute that says federal troops cannot engage in law enforcement activities.

Now, the federal government says in this case, under the protective power and under 12406, number one, we were not engaged in law enforcement activities.

The rules for the use of force that we gave to the troops, that's like their rules of engagement, except in domestic context, we call that rules for the use of force, did not involve, for example, making arrests.

Troops were told that they could not make arrests.

So his testimony was

And also he expressed resistance at first when federal immigration authorities wanted military support.

So his testimony was important for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that He testified that he expressed reservations, and stronger than that, that he voiced opposition to this operation, and that he was rebuked by a senior Customs and Border Patrol official who questioned his loyalty to the nation, which is very surprising.

It's very important that the military are able to express their concerns about the boundaries of the operations that they're being asked to undertake.

And normally, that would be given an awful lot of deference.

When you have a senior military leader who is saying, this is not an operation that we should be undertaking, it's not appropriate for the military, you would expect an administration to be sensitive and respectful of that.

But it also suggests that there was a sort of pecking order, and that was a concern about this operation to begin with.

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